Esther Stories Read Online Free Page A

butter left crusted on frying pans? Or simply that her body had begun to rot while she was alive up here? She never had many things. Not even a rug in the hall; only a bus schedule for the 112, long out-of-date, thumbtacked to the inside of the front door. (Where did she take the bus? Whom did she go see?) Three rooms: a kitchen, a cramped living room, mostly taken up by a couch that was once yellow but now bleached nearly white by the sun of the uncurtained window, a tiny bedroom made cave-like by the slope of the roof. He stoops and goes into the bedroom. He tries to avoid looking at the bed and fails. It is neat and hand-smoothed, except for a small furrow in the pillow. The afternoon sun has forced its way into this nook. There’s a glint of a spider’s thread reaching from the dresser to the window like a fishing line. Determined to stop lolling over this, he flings open the accordion doors and rams his face deep into the jackets and sweaters and coats and bear-hugs them together. Then he lifts all the clothes, as one, off the rack.
      
    He and Ellen had been lingering forever at the kitchen table. In the bright kitchen glare of one or two in the morning (neither of them had bothered to look at a clock for hours), he stared at her warily. She’d already crumpled every bill from the basket on top of the refrigerator and flung them at him. Eastern Edison, City of Brockton (water), City of Brockton (late property tax adjustment form), Bay State Gas (urgent reply requested), New England Telephone and Telegraph, Delta Visa, another Eastern Edison, Sears Automotive, another City of Brockton. He used to call himself a restorer of houses. One year he even told people he was a “preservationist.” He had loved his falling-down wrecks, his albatrosses, but he can’t do the work anymore. He blames it on his knees and his lower back, but it’s really this tiredness he’s got. Ellen asking, always asking, “My God, what’s wrong with you, man as big as you, look at the size of you.” And his wanting to explain, but not knowing how, repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” This exhaustion that no amount of sleep or coffee could defeat. And like the clutch of houses he bought so many years ago, with the money that landed in his lap from the moon—an inheritance mailed from some lawyer’s office in New York City (when Ellen first said, “We can be landlords. We’ll never pay rent again!”)—he’s letting himself go slowly to ruin. Now he sits on rents. Now he won’t come to the phone when tenants call. Now he’s being sued. Now he’s being hailed before the Massachusetts Land Commission Review Board on property-neglect charges. It’s not the bills, Ellen once said, but that you think you can live without anybody noticing you. Even so—the overdue notices and the warnings were starting to kill her, and that night she was just about to open her mouth with more bad numbers when the old woman upstairs started pushing something across the floor. Ellen lifted her head and listened; then suddenly she spoke in her hushy curious voice, a voice he hadn’t heard in so long: “She’s blind, you know.”
    “Who?”
    Ellen pointed at the ceiling. “She told me the other day. She said she’d been going that way for years, and she might as well tell somebody it actually happened. No more sight. Just lights and darks.”
    “The old bird? But she gets around fine. She’s got to be able to see something.”
    “Memorized. Neighborhood’s all in her head. Potholes. The aisles down at the Peach.”
    He looked up. “And all the redecorating?”
    Ellen laughed and slid her cup toward him. Her cold coffee sloshed on the table. “I asked her finally. I figured if she was telling me things, why not? And you know what she said?”
    “What?”
    “She said if I don’t make my apartment an obstacle course, I’ll forget I can’t see.”
    “Huh?”
    “I have so many pictures in my head, she said, so so